Chris Jones wrote: > I seem to remember back in the mists of time long lost that DOS 1.1 was > actually using very similar commands to unix (notably cd, mkdir, but > _not_ more or ls, for some reason best known to a certain W Gates who > apparently jointly wrote PC-DOS as it was then called). Jim Cornette replied: > I don't remember that farback in versions of DOS. The story that I heard > was that he bought the OS off of some other individual or small company. > (Dirty DOS or something) Then sold the OS bought for a small fraction, > then sold it to IBM. Then IBM cleaned out a slew of bugs. Well, I don't remember that far back personally, either. But Eric Raymond claims it was Tim Paterson who wrote Quick and Dirty OS in six weeks at http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/MS-DOS.html, which bears out what I've heard elsewhere. Dos 1 never had subdirectories: that came in DOS 2. DOS 2 was intended, back in those dim distant days, to be a migration path to Xenix, a rather awful port of Unix to run on the PCs of those days. So that's where the Unix-a-like syntax came from. (The PC market didn't want to migrate, unless they could run all their existing programs as well as they could on DOS. This started a trend that has been the Curse of the Computer Industry for the next twenty-odd years). I don't think IBM got seriously into DOS code until around DOS 4, when it was obvious that it was going to be a major IBM product line. James. -- E-mail address: james | "The US Air Force is removing harmful "greenhouse" @westexe.demon.co.uk | gases from the cooling systems of intercontinental | ballistic missiles. This will minimise damage to the | ozone layer in the event of a nuclear holocaust." | -- The Guardian.
